As Ryan explains, scholars wonder why, for thousands of years, when humans lived in hunter-gatherer societies, “nothing was happening” to signify progress.

In nearly every society, psychedelics have been considered among the greatest gifts bestowed on humanity by the gods. Kinship, freedom, individual responsibility, respect, autonomy and solidarity are values guaranteed to make the most depressed human a happy fellow.

Pangloss even goes on to provide optimistic explanations for what might not otherwise appear material from the best of all possible worlds opinion – you know, like his being hanged for heresy by the inquisition. In this same conversation, he discussed other cultures that leave their sick/elderly behind so they can die, or actively kill them with or without their knowledge, but suggested this shouldn't be taken into account when discussing if they are more or less peaceful than modern civilized people. From the first line written in the book, readers sense a personal and emotional disgust that Ryan has for civilization.

But Ryan provides only a few concrete ideas of how to foster and preserve elements of our lost forager culture. He focuses on the disruptive role of agriculture in human history, marking that as the period during which we veered off course. We hear some myths and lies so frequently that they feel like truths: Civilization is humankind's greatest accomplishment. While that may be true, there are very few hunter-gatherer societies that are able to make such a decision in today’s increasingly urban, deforested world.People I have spoken to who have lost family members to cancer, say, have wondered if their family member might have been better off not ‘fighting’ cancer, and therefore suffering the agony of surgery and of chemo and of other medications and so on, or if it might have been better to have just let the disease run its course and rather spent their time trying to achieve some form of acceptance. Impossible Christianity offers a kind word for those who are struggling to find meaning in the repetition of daily life. Ryan posits that civilization has given rise to competitive institutions thriving on ever-expanding commerce, displacing the sense of meaning and happiness that humans experienced during 99% of our existence on this planet. Rather than leaning on the sexy-but-unpersuasive case that civilization is plain poison, Ryan might have focused more on what hunter-gatherers have done right and pivoting sooner to how we might recreate the best aspects of our ancestral past — insofar as it’s possible. It is also difficult to negate that civilization as we know it, has put up some important barriers in the possibility to practice this lifestyle.

He also dispels a number of myths along the way here – not least the ‘short’ part of Hobbes’s quote above. For example, food is shared with everyone, even those who had nothing to do with gathering or hunting it. Once farming anchored people in place, he says, social hierarchies solidified and the fates of many grew subject to the whims of a few, spawning modern afflictions like wealth disparities, monarchies, and even slavery. I bolded the only things that are true for foragers: no big buildings, no tools to move the earth, and no writing. I don’t believe some governments somewhere ever declared “let’s make people miserable for our own sake”.The successful decentralized Kickstarter app, which uses cooperation to fund projects, is his prime example of this.

Foragers felt comfortable living close to the earth, cooperating with one another, and even with predators. But we do seem to be destroying the basis upon which our lives on this planet can be sustained, and if that is as good as civilisation gets, you do get to see why ‘primitive’ peoples might look at us 'civilised' people as if we were insane when we tell them how much more ‘advanced’ we are compared to them. But in fact, most of these monuments memorialize the dark deeds of unhinged lunatics driven by rampant ego and raving greed. Adaptation—and, by extension, evolution—doesn’t presuppose that a species is getting “better” as it evolves, merely that it is growing more suited to its environment. It’s true that social change is outpacing our brains’ and bodies’ ability to adapt to it, and that we have failed to tailor our resource consumption to our planet’s available limits.This, he states, while referencing the work of author Jean Liedloff, gives them “a precognitive sense of being wanted and loved. There are two views of the prehistory of humans that have defined much of post-enlightenment thinking on the subject. One is my distaste for both Pinker and Dawkins who are more generally held to be the heroes and even linchpins of modern-day rationalism.